Reclaiming the Sacred: Healing Our Relationships with Ourselves and the World

By Jeff Golden

GRAND PRIZEWINNER -- 2023 Nautilus Book Award

"This book is profound... A must-read... Five stars." --Reader's Favorite

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Golden
• Release date: Oct 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986725451

Book preview

Reclaiming

the

Sacred

Healing Our Relationships

with Ourselves

and the World

Jeff Golden

Copyright © 2022 by Jeff Golden

All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise cited, all poems from the Penguin publication Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky, copyright 2002 and used with permission.

Where is the Door to the Tavern? and Now Is the Time from The Gift: Poems of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky, copyright 1999 and used with permission.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, excerpts from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Copyright © 2013, 2015 by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions. www.milkweed.org.

Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Into the Dreaming of Earth by Stephen Harrod Buhner published by Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company, ©2014. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. www.Innertraditions.com

Love After Love from Sea Grapes by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1976 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.

The Guest House from The Illuminated Rumi by Jalal Al-Din Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, copyright © 1997 by Coleman Barks and Michael Green. Used by permission of Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

ISBN: 9798986725420 (pbk.) — ISBN: 9798986725475 (e-book)

www.reclaimingthesacred.net

All proceeds from this book are being donated

to nonprofits doing critical work related to the themes

of this book. See www.reclaimingthesacrd.net/proceeeds

for more information.

Contents

Introduction

Part I - The Abundance Point: Money and Happiness

1. Money Just Can’t Buy What It Used To

2. Twins, Lotteries, and Human Resilience: Welcome to the Set Point

3. How Much Is Enough? Nailing Down the Abundance Point

Part II - Charting the Path of a Joyful Life

4. The Hap in Our Happiness: The Role of Circumstances

5. Spouses and Kids and Sex, Oh My! The Role of Kith and Kin

6. More Sleep, Less Cow: Physical Health and Happiness

7. A Fool’s Life or a Labor of Love? Work and Happiness

8. The Hard Test of Our Wisdom: Television and the Internet

Part III - Happiness and the Journey Within

9. Free Your Mind

10. Nurturing a Positive Relationship with Destruction

11. Living in Mystery, Magic, and Miracle

12. The Heart of Happiness: Loving Ourselves

13. The Scourge of Rampant Happiness

14. Dancing with the Universe

Happiness Coda

Part IV - Dueling with Death, Destiny, and Other Minor

Demons: The Psychology of Money

15. Money Strikes Back (Sort Of): Long Life, Prosperity, and Power

16. The Dopamine Reward System, Hijacked

17. Sex, Status, & Stuff: Being Conspicuous with Our Consumption

18. Retail Therapy: Taking Our Insecurities and Fears to the Mall

19. The Great Breath Retention Contest: Security at All Costs

20. The Soulcraft of Modern Materialism:

Consumption, Culture, and Ideology

Money Coda

Part V - Living the Great Lie: Scarcity

21. Abundance Denied: An Illustrative Tale

22. The Fourth Sister—and Bottlenecks, Toxic Waste, & Sorcery

23. For the Otters, the Redwoods, the Children of Bhopal:

The Reality Beyond the Picture Show

Our Daily Companion: Oil

The Lives That Give Us Life: Factory Farms

The Best of the Best: Apple

What We Should Expect to Find

24. We Are the Machine, We Are Blossoms: Exit Strategies

Part VI - Coming Home: Abundance, Belonging, & Love

25. Another World is Possible

26. From Owning to Belonging

27. Infinite Gratitude and the Gift of Everything

28. Feel the Wind, Drink the Stars, & Take Only What You Need

29. The Foundation of the Universe: Being Abundance

30. What If?

31. Awakening from a Dream into the Universe

32. A Love Song to You and the World

If Only We Would Drink

Neurological Gating and the Response of the Heart

The Fire Behind the Equations

Option D: Opening to the Mystical

Glimpses of the Source of All of Us

Coming Home

The Intimacy of You and the Divine

Live the Answers

The Center of the Temple

Every Ancestor in Every Breath

The Shared Breath of Life

Love Notes

Everything is Meant for You

Your Inherent Belonging and Sacred Place

Revisiting Love and Sunshine

Snowstorms, Silence, and the Dream from Ahead

A Love Song to You

Author’s Note

Gratitude

Endnotes

Introduction

W

e in the United States live amidst material wealth unimaginable to most people throughout human history, and far beyond the reach of most people throughout the world today. Yet we also live amidst an immense poverty. Surveys reveal that, on average, we are less happy, more depressed, and lonelier than ever. We consume two-thirds of the world’s antidepressants, drug overdoses are the number one cause of death for those of us under age fifty, and each year one in twenty-five of us seriously considers suicide.1

This is not a coincidence, or a contradiction. This material wealth and poverty of spirit are intimately related.

Research shows that money and possessions do very little for our happiness or well-being—far less than most Americans imagine. To be clear, money can boost our happiness, but only up until we’re able to meet our basic needs at a very simple level. After that, additional money does almost nothing for us.

Research also shows that materialism is toxic for happiness, that the more importance we place on money and possessions, the more strained our relationships tend to be, the lower our sense of self-worth, and the more fleeting our happiness. Add to that, the pursuit of money and possessions often crowds out the things that really do matter, like spending time with friends and family, being physically active, and having time to do the things we find enjoyable and just relax.

In many ways, the tremendous materialism and material wealth of this society are, in fact, evidence of the deeper poverty we live in. Research shows that one of the major reasons money is so important to so many of us, despite doing so little to actually benefit us, is that we use it to try to make up for a lack of some of the things that really do matter: we tend to buy more and give more significance to money and work when we feel unhappy, stressed, or lonely, when we feel inadequate, scared, or rejected, or when we feel a lack of purpose in our lives.

Working more and buying things are ways we try to numb these feelings of lack, or to distract ourselves from them. Ultimately, they are ways we try to fill the holes in ourselves and our lives.

In other words, the fact that we in the US care so much about money and possessions, and have collectively accumulated such staggering material wealth—these are indicators that something is very wrong. They speak to how diminished our lives are in very important respects, and how disconnected we have become from the fundamental wealth of ourselves and the world.

But we don’t just suffer this poverty ourselves. Our addiction to consumption causes tremendous harm to others as well. We create waste that will be hazardous to life for millions of years; we discard so much trash that soon there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans; we relegate huge numbers of people to poverty, even to slavery—there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, many of them making products for the American market. In the US alone, we condemn ten billion animals each year to spend their lives locked in factory farms.

We are, meanwhile, destroying the very fabric of life on the planet. Humans have killed half the population of wild animals in the last forty years, we have destroyed or degraded 85 percent of the world’s forests, and we have transformed more than 70 percent of the earth’s land surface.

Overshadowing all of this though, is what we’re doing to the climate. There is nothing in human history—not world wars or plagues or famines—that can compare with the amount of violence and destruction we are unleashing through climate change. Droughts, wildfires, the spread of disease, the collapse of food supplies, an estimated one billion climate refugees—these are just a few of the consequences we’re facing.

Between 40 and 80 percent of all species may not survive to see the next century.

We are one of those species.

Americans are only 4 percent of the world population, yet we have caused as much as one-third of global warming. We—Americans—have to make significant changes. That includes things like shifting to renewable energy and efficient technologies. It also includes ending the $20 billion in subsidies we give to oil companies every year, and banning new fossil fuel projects. But we have to go deeper than that.

We have to address the root causes of this violence, the root causes of our addiction to consumption. Otherwise we as a society will do what we’ve always done, steamroll right over these changes and keep consuming more and more.

For those of us who have access to the things that have to be scaled back—which is many of us in the US but very few of us worldwide—these changes can evoke a sense of sacrifice or loss. But what we have before us is actually an opportunity to live richer and more joyful lives.

As we’ve surrounded ourselves with more and more possessions, we’ve grown further from the sacredness of the world, and the sacredness of ourselves. As we’ve elevated economic growth and production and consumption to the highest measures of success and purpose, we’ve closed ourselves off from so much of the joy and wonder and belonging that are inherent in us and the world.

We have an opportunity to reorient our lives toward the things that really do matter. An opportunity to slow down, to be present, to hear our deeper callings. An opportunity to shift our attention from "the things we don’t have or the things we have to give up," to so much that we do have. From food and shelter, to our breath, the sky, movement, life.

We have an opportunity to reweave ourselves back into the human community and the family of all living beings, the family of the land and trees, the otters and grasses—to live with them in relationships of respect.

We have an opportunity to reclaim ourselves and this world as sacred.

It is a profound blessing that so many of the changes our current crisis requires are precisely what best serve us. So much of what we must surrender actually impoverishes us—even those of us who have supposedly benefitted the most from it. And so much of what we must embrace actually nourishes happiness, abundance, and belonging.

Indeed, the extensive research that has been done in regards to the sciences of happiness, abundance, and belonging offer a way forward out of this system and its deceptions and poverty, and into entirely different ways of thinking and feeling and living. They are like golden threads we can follow home to the heart of ourselves and the world.

That is the journey of this book: to follow these golden threads of happiness, abundance, and belonging.

Guiding us in this journey will be literally thousands of experts—Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning psychologists and economists, Indigenous people, saints and poets, cosmologists and activists, and a few fictional characters thrown in for good measure. Their work and insights flow through every page, yielding the roughly 2,500 references at the end of the book.

I also offer to you, woven into this journey, the terrain of my own mind and heart. Only occasionally does my own life make an explicit appearance, but it is present in the vision I bring to these pages.

I am here as a father, and also as a six-year-old boy cracked open by the death of my own father. I am here as a husband of sixteen years, and as a man cracked open again with the end of that marriage. I am a child become a teenager, marked by periodic bursts of violence in the form of being bullied. And I am a teenager grown into an adult, carrying deep insecurities around masculinity and sex and being a very sensitive person. And I am that sensitive person, nourished by significant time spent with the stars and trees and rivers and animals, and by living and traveling widely throughout the world, and by just doing a lot of deep personal work.

Also woven into this book are my more explicitly professional experiences. The most obvious of these, in terms of what would appear on a resume, are my two decades of directing several nonprofits, and cofounding and living in two intentional communities dedicated to sustainability and justice. Nonprofits and intentional communities are both notoriously challenging, and I definitely experienced a lot of difficulty and heartbreak during those times, along with much success and joy.

Also present in this book, though, are many experiences hidden behind those broad strokes, each with its own mix of accomplishments and shortfalls. For example, about fifteen years ago, while heading one of those nonprofits, I directed the creation of one of the greenest certified buildings in the US. Then, when nobody in the local area could even tell me which Native Americans’ homeland the building was located in, I researched that history, and I went to visit members of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians in Wisconsin, and I undertook projects to help raise awareness back in New York about them and their history. Then, when it came time for the nonprofit to sell the building, we directed the proceeds to the Mohican Language and Culture Committee as a way of supporting them and acknowledging their rightful stake in the land we had benefitted from and bought and sold.

To offer another example, in 2015, when corrections officers murdered a man, Sam Harrell, who was incarcerated in a prison mere minutes from my home (a young Black man with bipolar disorder, incarcerated for selling drugs), I dropped everything to help organize the local community and work with his family to seek justice for him, and to try to help prevent anything like that from happening again. We led protests, including a brief hunger strike by members of his family, we got national media coverage, and we met with more than twenty state representatives. We were successful in raising awareness about the need for prison reform, and we contributed to the passage of restrictions on the use of solitary confinement in New York State. But we had to live with the heartache and rage that nothing else at the prison changed, and not one of the officers involved in the murder was ever held accountable.

Some of my other professional experiences that inform my life and the journey of this book are: six years I spent launching an online education program for students to collaborate with Nobel Peace Prize laureates and others around the world to learn about current events and culture; five years where I participated in powerful dialogue work on Race, Class, Gender and Power, led by the incredibly skilled and visionary people at Be Present, Inc.; five years I gave to teaching Latin American literature in the Spanish bilingual program at Mission and Leadership High Schools in San Francisco; and a year working with community organizers in a shantytown in Venezuela (Barrio Bolivar) and evaluating environmental education programs throughout the country.

I’ve been researching and writing this book for twelve years, I’ve been leading courses on these topics for over five years, most recently at Vassar College, and I’ve been writing and teaching about them in other settings for over thirty years.

Humbly, and with a full heart, I offer myself (and our thousands of guides) and this book to you.

Over the course of seven parts, two codas, and three interludes, this book will lay before you the golden threads of happiness, abundance, and belonging, inviting you to follow them.

The science of happiness—the vast body of research that has been conducted by psychologists, economists, and sociologists, their countless studies, surveys, and peer reviews—this science will illuminate for you the most critical factors that contribute to human well-being and how to apply them in your own life. As mentioned earlier, this science will definitely invite you to spend time with family and friends, to be physically active,and to take time to relax. But more than that, it will take you soaring through galaxies and diving into the foundations of the universe, seeking to stir in you wonder and delight. It will sit with you in stillness before a cherry blossom, a blade of grass, your own breath, seeking to nourish presence and gratitude. It will walk with you gently into your own heart, helping you heal wounds, touch emotions, and listen to your deepest callings.

The science of abundance—and the evolutionary biologists, Indigenous writers, activists, and others who will join our team of guides—will take you behind the scenes of this careening, materialistic train we are on. This science will make it clear just how limited the role is of money and possessions in our well-being, it will tell you concretely how much money really is enough to maximize your well-being, and it will lay bare the ways that money so often hooks us, despite not doing much for our happiness. And then… the science of abundance will take you by the hand and jump off this train with you. It will lie with you looking up at the sky as the train disappears into the distance, as the sounds of the wind and birds and crickets emerge in its place. This science will reveal the vast abundance that exists in the world around you and the world within you.

Then, when you are ready, the science of belonging—along with the physicists, brain researchers, cosmologists, saints, and poets who will add their voices—will climb with you to the tops of the pillars of the scientific revolution, and then dive with you into the vast realm of possibility that lies beyond. It will affirm that the forests and rivers and bison and salamanders, are so much more than resources, that they are each a face of creation and deserve our reverence. And it will affirm that you are also a face of creation, that you are as central to the unfolding of the universe as any supernova or waterfall or gravity, and that you also deserve reverence. It will read love notes to you from the world, and it will remind you that you are yourself a love note to the world.

You.

You are sacred.

When this book refers to Reclaiming the Sacred, the most important thing it is referring to is you.

By sacred, I do not mean something that is considered sacred within a particular religious tradition or institution. I mean it in the sense of those things that are of the most profound meaning and importance, worthy of being held with the utmost awe and respect.

Author Arne Garborg once wrote, To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten. That is the purpose of this book, to sing to you parts of your song, your beautiful, vibrant song. It is to sing to you of your immense wondrousness and inherent belonging. It is to sing to you of the sacredness of you and the world. It is to help you connect with the joy and purpose that blossom when we live in these truths. It is to help you forge the kind of life and the kind of world that we all deserve.

Jeff Golden

June, 2022

Part I

The

Abundance

Point

Chapter 1

Money Just Can’t Buy

What It Used To

I

n many ways, Americans today live in an entirely different world from the one we knew just a century ago. As late as the 1940s most Americans lived in conditions that few today would consider acceptable.

A third of homes didn’t have indoor toilets or running water, more than half lacked central heating, and almost none had air-conditioning. 1 There was one car for every five people, a phone was still a luxury for most, and a 1945 poll found that most Americans didn’t even know what a television was. 2 Food, penicillin, and many manufactured goods were in short supply due to World War II. 3

We’ve come a long way since then:

Running water is nearly universal.4

Most homes not only have air-conditioning and central heating, but also a fridge, washer, dryer, and dishwasher, as well as a TV, and an average of twenty-five consumer electronic devices.5

New houses have more than doubled in size, even while the average household has shrunk by more than one person.6

Two-thirds of homes have a garage or carport, and there are fifty million more registered vehicles than licensed drivers.7

Not only do the vast majority of Americans have a phone, but two-thirds of us have a smartphone, which 47 percent of us report we couldn’t last a day without.8

Our per capita income, adjusted for inflation, has increased by more than 250 percent since the 1940s.9 Most of those gains have gone to the wealthiest of us, but median income, a statistic that better reflects the reality of most Americans, has still increased by nearly 60 percent.10

Fifteen of every one hundred of us in the US still live in poverty, and our lives are shaped by the higher rates of violence, abuse, neglect, and certain mental health issues that come with that.11 For some of us, living in poverty involves hunger or even homelessness. Yet even those of us living in poverty are generally far better off in material terms than the average person was in the 1940s. Most Americans in poverty today not only have the basics that 1940s Americans did not have—running water, heat, air-conditioning, and a washer/dryer—but also generally have a car, two TVs, cable or satellite, several electronic devices, and more living space than the average European.12

What has the impact of these monumental material gains been on our happiness? On a scale of one to ten, in the 1940s we scored 7.5. As of 2008 we scored 7.2.13 That’s right; we are less happy. In fact, our rates of happiness have been in a pretty constant decline since the 1940s, even during periods of great economic growth.14 On top of that:

Our depression rates have increased tenfold.15

One in fifteen of us abuses alcohol.16

We consume two-thirds of the world’s antidepressants—more than any other prescribed drug.17

Drug overdoses are the number one cause of death for those under age fifty.18

The number of us with no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, and more than half of us feel that there is not a single person who knows us well.19

We have the fourteenth highest murder rate in the world, eighteen times higher than any Western European country, and we commit suicide at about twice the rate we kill each other, up 33 percent in roughly the last twenty years. One in twenty-five of us seriously considers suicide every year.20

The average child experiences more anxiety on a regular basis than the level of anxiety that in the 1950s caused a child to be referred for psychiatric treatment, and more than one in twenty teens today is on some kind of psychiatric medication.21

In his landmark book The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, political psychologist Robert E. Lane offers a visual representation of one aspect of this: he charts our declining happiness against our increasing incomes from 1940 to 1990.

Figure 1. Index of people reporting being very happy and GDP per capita in the US, 1946–1990.22

As the title of Lane’s book suggests, we’re not alone in this general trend. Levels of happiness have remained virtually unchanged in most industrialized countries since the 1940s, with some edging upward slightly, but many declining. This is perhaps most striking in the case of Japan, whose per capita income following World War II increased five-fold in just thirty years, doubling what we have accomplished in the US, and in half the time. Yet their happiness has remained the same.23

On the other hand, there are many countries—Nigeria, Mexico, and Vietnam, for example—whose average income is only a fraction of ours, yet whose happiness is greater.24 Likewise, the Irish are happier than the Germans, who are twice as financially wealthy, the Taiwanese are as happy as the Japanese, who are three times as wealthy, and so on.25How is this possible? How is it that we are swimming in this vast material wealth, and yet we are less happy than we were in the relative poverty of the 1940s? Central to understanding this, and to seizing a profound opportunity to live more joyful and sustainable lives, is the abundance point.

At the heart of the abundance point is the fact that money simply has a very limited impact on our happiness. To be clear, money does buy happiness—a good deal of it, in fact, for many of us worldwide. Study after study confirms that if we do not have enough money to meet our basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, then, on average, every bit of money we get until we can meet those needs does boost our happiness.26 It’s just that after that the relationship between money and happiness drops off rapidly.

The abundance point (my term) is the point where that drop-off happens, which is basically the point where we are able to meet our basic needs. Up until the abundance point, there is a consistent link between money and happiness. Beyond the abundance point, not so much. More money does continue to buy more happiness, just very little of it, and its impact diminishes rapidly until, at the saturation point (again, my term), additional money does nothing for our happiness.27

This means you could give a small amount of money to someone who lives below the abundance point and they will usually be happier for it. Give someone who lives above the abundance point some money, even a lot of it, and they will also tend to be happier, but only very slightly. Hand someone who lives at or beyond the saturation point a lot of money, even vast amounts of it, and (after an initial rush) and it will generally have no effect; they will tend to be just as happy as they were before.

This helps explain why people with incomes over $10 million annually tend to be only slightly happier than the average person. And why 37 percent of the wealthiest Americans are actually less happy than the average American.28

Even for those of us who live below the abundance point, we need to be careful not to exaggerate the importance of money to happiness. For a long time, as one gets further and further below the abundance point, people still tend to be happy. It is only when we reach the point of the most extreme and persistent poverty (what we could call the deprivation point) that that flips and people tend to be unhappy. Even then the relationship is weak enough that, for example, most people in Malawi are fairly happy, even though three-fourths of them live on the equivalent of $1.25 a day or less.29

Interestingly, the amount of money we spend seems to impact our happiness even less than the amount of money we have or receive in income. With the exception of a few specific and limited kinds of spending, like donating to charity and spending on social activities, research suggests that for people living above the abundance point, there is zero connection between spending and happiness.30

Put all of this together and researchers have concluded that our income accounts for only 2 to 4 percent of our happiness.31

The relatively limited ability of money to impact our happiness is underscored by just how much the reverse is true, that is, by how much power our happiness actually has over our financial situation. It’s not that being happy brings us more money (though research suggests there is something to that as well, because we tend to be more productive, healthier, and more creative when we are happy, and we are more likely to be hired and promoted32); it’s rather that our happiness largely determines our financial outlook.

You would think that the more money a person has, the more satisfied they would be with their financial situation, right? And that’s true to a degree. But how happy someone is, in general, is a four times better predictor of how satisfied they are with their financial situation than their income.33 In other words, if we’re generally happy, then we tend to be happy with our income, whatever it is. If we’re not happy, then no matter how much money we make, we generally aren’t happy with it.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that we Americans are not only slightly less happy than we were in the 1940s, but we are also less happy with our financial situations, despite our stunning material gains.34

There is a saying, Enough is as good as a feast. This captures the spirit behind the name the abundance point. Once we have enough money to meet our basic needs, having more money is like having more food set before us when we’re already satisfied—we can continue to enjoy it for a while, but nothing like when we were hungry, and at some point all the food in the world could be set before us to no effect. Once our needs are met, we have truly crossed over into a realm of abundance, where, in terms of happiness anyway, there is very little difference between what we actually have and having everything in the world.

It’s not just that once we have enough money to meet our basic needs, more money doesn’t do much for us; it’s that at that point we already generally have all the money we need to maximize our happiness, and pursuing more money actually becomes an obstacle to realizing that potential. This is because there are many things that have a greater impact on our happiness than money, and pursuing more money often means sacrificing those other things.

We will be exploring these critical happiness factors in parts II and III, Charting the Path of a Joyful Life and Happiness and the Journey Within, but consider for now this one example. Political economist Stefano Bartolini has calculated that a person with no friends or social relations with neighbors would have to earn $320,000 more each year just to enjoy the same level of happiness as someone who does.35 Most of us could dedicate our entire lives to making money and couldn’t ever make the $320,000 a year needed to compensate for having a very limited social life. Or we could much more easily, and for a fraction of the time, simply commit to making some friends and meeting our neighbors, and tend to some of the other major happiness factors on top of that, and be just as happy, or happier.

And, as striking as this statistic is, it actually gives money far too much credit. It does not take into account the very fact we’re exploring here about money, that it buys less and less happiness until, at the saturation point, it can buy no more. As we will soon see, researchers have been able to put specific amounts to the abundance and saturation points, and $320,000 is vastly beyond both of them. This means we could actually keep heaping money on the heads of people with no social relations forever and (on average) they would never be as happy as people who do have friends and interactions with their neighbors.

So even though, yes, more money does generally boost our happiness up until the saturation point, pursuing more money often actually means being less happy than we could be otherwise.36 In fact, this is true even for those of us who do not have enough money to meet all our basic needs, those of us who live below the abundance point—these other factors are still often much more significant than money.37

All of this offers at least a cursory answer to our question: How is it that we’re swimming in this vast material wealth yet we’re less happy than we were in the 1940s? But it raises another important one: Why is money so important to so many of us and our society if it has so little effect on our happiness? We need to have some understanding of this if we are going to be able to take seriously just how little money does for our happiness, and to resist whatever the hooks are that catch so many of us, and cause so many of us to choose the pursuit of money over the things that really do matter.

The answer involves biology, culture, sex, and more, which will be the focus of part IV, Dueling with Death, Destiny, and Other Minor Demons. In short, though, it has a lot to do with the same happiness factors we will explore in parts II and III. Specifically, money is able to hook us largely by rushing in and (to a certain degree) making up for an absence of those things that really do have a significant impact on our happiness. Money can’t actually replace them, but it can help distract us and somewhat numb the discomfort and pain of those absences.

In part V, Living the Great Lie, we will explore the vast consequences of our making money such a priority and neglecting those things that really do matter. We’ll also meet with some youth activists, indigenous leaders, formerly enslaved people, and the heads of revolutionary movements, as we plot our exit strategies from this system of money-and-possessions-first.

Then in part VI, Coming Home, we will go beyond all of this as we consider some final critical questions, What is the alternative? and Where do we go from here? We will walk right up to the edge of what this system can see and imagine, and we will leap into the immense and dazzling possibility beyond. We will explore entirely different ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves and the world, ways that are rooted in abundance, belonging, and love.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, there is a bit more for us to explore about the relationship between money and happiness. And central to that is what psychologists refer to as the set point. Understanding the set point will provide critical insight into how the abundance point works, while also introducing us to the single greatest factor affecting our happiness.

Chapter 2

Twins, Lotteries, and

Human Resilience:

Welcome to the Set Point

I

n 1998, five decades into our country’s astonishing material and financial transformation described in the last chapter, and five decades into our slow-motion decline in happiness, the newly elected head of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman, chose positive psychology as the theme of his presidency.1

The genesis story of positive psychology goes something like this: In the beginning there was psychology. Psychology was dedicated to studying the whole range of mental disorders that afflict humans. But then some psychologists decided to turn that on its head and focus instead on what leads to human flourishing. Thus was born a new field of study, one that focuses its attention on all things related to happiness and well-being instead of illness.2

Happiness has been a central concern for humans as long as we have been around—we are naturally drawn to those things that make us happy and seek to avoid those that make us unhappy.3 We have thousands of years of texts of people writing about happiness, tens of thousands if you consider the earliest known cave paintings of horses and reindeer to be reflections on the good things in life.4

But it’s only in the past several decades that we’ve begun to rigorously test our ideas about happiness. Research on the subject has blossomed during that time, as Seligman both acknowledged and spurred on by making it the theme of his presidency. Today there’s a whole industry dedicated to positive psychology, involving journals, conferences, books, podcasts, personal coaches, tote bags, and more. The field is rife with disagreements and there are still huge gaps in what we know, but it has also made huge strides and has achieved consensus in many areas.

One of the most significant of these points of consensus came to light in 1996, three years before positive psychology actually got its name. A landmark study by psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen found that for identical twins the number one predictor of how happy they were wasn’t their income, their level of education, or whether they were married. Rather, it was how happy their twin was. This was not just the number one predictor, it was by far the number one predictor.

The happiness of nonidentical twins varied significantly, but for identical twins the effect was just as strong for those who’d been raised apart as it was for those who’d been raised together, meaning the very similar levels of happiness weren’t the result of their having had the same upbringing.5 There was clearly something genetic going on.

Thanks to that study and others like it, psychologists have established that roughly 50 percent of our happiness is genetically based.6 Over time, independent of much of what happens in our lives, we tend to settle back in around a level of happiness that’s natural for each of us—what’s referred to as our set point.

On one level this seems kind of obvious: some of us are just naturally happier than others. But on another level it kind of defies how most of us think about happiness: no matter what we do or what happens in our lives, we tend to return to a level of happiness that is natural for us.

This is testimony to the power of human adaptation.7 For example, that super cool flat-screen TV might have been a thrill the first week you had it, but you get used to it and soon it becomes your new normal. The same goes for negative things: over time they generally lose their edge as we get used to them, whether it’s a breakup or a broken bone or the loss of a job.

At the same time, each new experience becomes a new reference point for us, and raises or lowers the bar for other experiences. We could call this the first-day-back-at-work-after-vacation effect, or the first-day-back-at-work-after-camping-in-the-rain-for-days-with-previously-really-good-friends effect.

Adaptation has its pros and cons. On the downside, it means that contrary to what your friendly local car dealer, realtor, or phone salesperson might have you believe, the thrill of buying a new car, house, or phone wears off pretty quickly. A famous study by psychologist Philip Brickman involving big lottery winners found it took only a few months for the thrill to fade and for the winners to generally return to whatever level of happiness they were at before they won.8 On the upside, we also tend to rebound pretty quickly when bad things happen. In another part of that same study, Brickman found that it took people who were partially paralyzed in an accident roughly the same amount of time to return to their previous level of happiness as it did the lottery winners.9

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert refers to this as our psychological immune system.10 As we will see in chapter four, our circumstances can have a significant and lasting impact on our happiness, and the effects of negative events tend to last longer than positive ones. The effects of really negative events can last much longer. However, as psychologist Sonya Lyubomisrky notes, we usually adapt to most significant life events such as being accepted into graduate school, becoming an uncle, experiencing the death of a close friend, having financial problems, and getting promoted, within three to six months.11 Psychologist David Meyers notes, "Within a matter of weeks, one’s current mood is more affected by the day’s events—an argument with one’s spouse, a failure at work, a rewarding call or a gratifying letter from a dear friend or child" than by seemingly more significant life events.12

While there is definitely variation from person to person, our set points tend to be on the happier side of the spectrum. The majority of us are happy regardless of nationality, marital status, education, physical handicaps, and, yes, income. In other words, humans are generally hardwired to be happy. Which makes sense—it’s a pretty big evolutionary benefit for us to want to be alive and do the things it takes to stay alive.13

Now, depending on who you read, our set points aren’t really set—they can and do change over time. According to others, they’re not really points but ranges. Still others write about each of us having multiple set points.14 Nonetheless, forgiving positive psychologists these minor discrepancies that are still being worked out, we owe them a debt of gratitude for their insight into this most significant of happiness factors—the set point. This insight also goes a long way to helping us understand why money has so little impact on our happiness: not only does money have to compete with a number of other far more powerful factors, but thanks to our set points, 50 percent of our happiness is already off the table.

This will be very helpful when we consider the actual dollar amounts behind the abundance and saturation points in the next chapter, because those numbers are much lower than most people expect.

Chapter 3

How Much Is Enough?

Nailing Down

the Abundance Point

I

f you want to know how much is really enough for people to be their happiest selves, you would be advised not to ask them.

Richard Easterlin, credited as the first economist to officially study happiness, found that in 1978 a sample of people in their thirties felt they needed an average of 4.3 items on a list of big-ticket consumer goods in order to live a good life. The list of twenty-four items included a home, a car, and a TV, as well as a vacation home, a swimming pool, and travel abroad. At the time, those people had an average of 2.5 of these items.

Sixteen years later the same people owned an average of 3.2 items, meaning they were well on their way to that good life. Except that by then the average number of items they felt they needed had shifted to 5.4. So they were actually further from the good life than they were before, even though they had more of the things on the list.1

Further studies by Easterlin and others have confirmed that a similar thing happens with money: the more we get, the more we feel we need.2 Sociologist Lee Rainwater found that over a thirty-six-year period, the amount of money we report that we need to just get along increased in exact proportion to our incomes.3 Economist Juliet Schor likewise documented that between 1987 and 1996, when asked how much money we think it would take to fulfill our dreams, the average answer jumped from less than $70,000 to $90,000 (adjusted for inflation).4

Certainly there must be a point, though, where we do feel we have enough, right? At least if we’re really rich? Alas, even then a sense of enough seems to be elusive. Schor found that 25 percent of households with incomes that in 2021 would be at least $174,000 felt they didn’t have enough money to buy everything they really need. An additional 19 percent felt they spent nearly all their money on just the basic necessities of life.5

To be clear, someone with that much income ranks in the top 5 percent of incomes in the US, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent worldwide.6 So nearly half of us in this richest fraction of humanity feel that we spend almost all our money on basic necessities, or that we don’t even have enough to do that.

Psychologist Michael Norton surveyed the richer clients of a big investment bank on these topics. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) As these people accumulated more and more money, they were no happier for it. And when he asked them how much they would need to be happier, All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had.7

In the words of Jeff Yeager, an author on simple living, people "convince themselves that they need something when in fact they really don’t, or could choose a less costly alternative. … We need shelter, but we want it in the form of a seven-thousand-square-foot home with a swimming pool."8

That may be a bit extreme for most of us, but the idea is entirely accurate. Remember, in the 1940s almost nobody had air conditioning or a phone, not to mention indoor plumbing, and most Americans didn’t even know what a television was. As of 2010, the last time we were surveyed, 55 percent of us considered air conditioning a necessity, 62 percent said the same thing about a phone, and 47 percent of us said the same thing about a TV.9

It’s helpful to not only compare Americans today with 1940s Americans, but to compare us with more contemporary people in other parts of the world as well. A 2006 Pew survey asked Americans how many of the items presented to them on a list they felt were necessities. For people with incomes of $30,000 a year or less, most people said six to nine items. For people with incomes of $100,000 or more, the answer was in the range of ten to fourteen.10 By comparison, in a similar survey conducted in Vietnam around the same time, not a single item on the US survey made it onto most people’s lists. Only 21 percent thought a TV was a necessity, coming in behind a radio at 37 percent. Many people, 77 percent, thought that having a home constructed of stone was a necessity, while 23 percent thought that bamboo, straw, or mud were fully adequate. The top-ranked items were a bicycle, a wooden rice chest, and a thick blanket, all of which made 98 percent of people’s lists. (Note, that means two out of every hundred people thought they could still get by fine without those.)11

Clearly, our subjective sense of enough isn’t the most reliable measure. In fact, it is extremely unreliable, constantly leaping ahead of us at every turn. In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert points out that inherent in this continual ratcheting up of our expectations is a continual disregard for our own lived experience. We somehow think that this time is going to be different, that this time when we get that additional money or product or experience it is going to really make a difference. Even though it doesn’t. Over and over.12

One of the important reasons for this is that we tend to remember and anticipate the most dramatic aspects of an experience and disregard the less dramatic but far more substantive aspects. Gilbert cites a study in which college students were asked to predict how they would feel a few days after an upcoming football game against a rival college if their team won. Students consistently focused on how they would feel immediately after the win (The clock will hit zero, we’ll storm the field, everyone will cheer …) but they didn’t think much beyond that (And then I’ll go home and study for my final exams).13

One of the central points Gilbert makes in his book is that we are much better off if we consider people’s reports of how happy something has actually made them rather than trying to imagine that possibility for ourselves.14 So let’s return to our original